Big Data & Digital Future.

What is data?
Digital Data is information, quantities, characters, or symbols
that has been translated into a binary digital form that is more
convenient to move or process.
  Big Data may well be the Next Big Thing in the IT world.

 ‘Big Data’ is similar to ‘small data’, but bigger in size.

 Having data bigger it requires different approaches to

control it via techniques, tools and architecture.

 Big Data requires storage and processing of very large

quantities of digital information that cannot be analysed
with traditional computing techniques.
According to Bernard Marr's Big Data in Practice:
Every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the
beginning of time until 2003.
It is expected that by 2020 the amount of digital information in
existence will have grown from 3.2 zettabytes to 40 zettabytes.
The total amount of data being captured and stored by industry
doubles every 1.2 years.
Every minute we send 204 million emails, generate 1,8 million
Facebook likes, send 278 thousand Tweets, and up-load 200,000
photos to Facebook.
Google alone processes on average over 40 thousand search
queries per second, making it over 3.5 billion in a single day.
 Around 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every
minute and it would take you around 15 years to watch every
video uploaded by users in one day.

 If you burned all of the data created in just one day onto DVDs,
you could stack them on top of each other and reach the moon –
twice.
 AT&T is thought to hold the world’s largest volume of data in
one unique database – its phone records database is 312 terabytes
in size, and contains almost 2 trillion rows.
 570 new websites spring into existence every minute of every
day.
 1.9 million IT jobs will be created in the US by 2015 to carry out
big data projects. Each of those will be supported by 3 new jobs
created outside of IT – meaning a total of 6 million new jobs.
 Between them, companies monitoring Twitter to measure
“sentiment” analyze 12 terabytes of tweets every day.
 The amount of data transferred over mobile networks increased
by 81% to 1.5 exabytes (1.5 billion gigabytes) per month.
 This year, there will be over 1.2 billion smart phones in the
world (which are stuffed full of sensors and data collection
features), and the growth is predicted to continue.
 The boom of the Internet of Things will mean that the amount of
devices connected to the Internet will rise from about 13 billion
today to 50 billion by 2020.
 12 million RFID tags – used to capture data and track movement
of objects in the physical world. By 2021, it is estimated that
number will have risen to 209 billion.
 More ordinary ways to increase data.
It can be seen that everything we do is increasingly leaving a
digital trace (or data), which we (and others) store, use and analyse.
Simple activities like
reading a book online are now generating data.
eBooks collect data on our activities.
Your smart phone collects data on how you use it
 your web browser collects information on what you are
searching for.
Your credit card company collects data on where you shop and
your shop collects data on what you buy.
 Our conversations are now digitally recorded.
It all started with emails; all the conversations we have on social
media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Even many of our phone
conversations are now digitally recorded.
 All the pictures we take on our smart phones or digital cameras.
 We upload and share 100s of thousands of them on social media
sites every second.
 The increasing amounts of CCTV cameras take video images
and we up-load hundreds of hours of video images to YouTube
and other sites every minute.

It is hard to imagine any activity that does not generate data.

How is big data used for development?
Increasingly, governments, business, industry and organisations rely
on employees with an understanding what big data are, how they
can be used, and what their strengths and weaknesses might be.
Computer networks, devices and infrastructure today undergird
nearly all forms of societal, political and cultural life.
Police and hospitals, schools and transport, traffic lights and
government bodies, elections, museums and artists rely of software
systems for their everyday performance. Whether used for tracking,
organising, evaluating, creating, designing or communicating,
digital technology irreversibly transforms the fabric of everyday
life, defining the horizon of the future.
The new benefits that big data analytics brings to the table, however, are
speed and efficiency. The ability to work faster – and stay agile – gives
organizations a competitive edge they didn’t have before.
It can be used to identify new opportunities.
Using big data, Telecom companies can now better predict
customer rate; retailers can predict what products will sell, and
car insurance companies understand how well their customers
actually drive.
Big data has been used to predict crimes before they happen – a
“predictive policing” trial in California was able to identify areas
where crime will occur three times more accurately than existing
methods of forecasting.
Police forces use big data tools to catch criminals and even
predict criminal activity and credit card companies use big data
analytics it to detect fraudulent transactions.
The big objective, in many cases, is to create predictive
models.
To better understand and target customers, companies expand
their traditional data sets with social media data, browser, text
analytics or sensor data to get a more complete picture of their
customers. Big data is also increasingly used to optimize
business processes.
Retailers are able to optimize their stock based on predictive
models generated from social media data, web search trends
and weather forecasts.
Another example is supply chain or delivery route
optimization using data from geographic positioning and radio
frequency identification sensors.
A broad based study by researchers at MIT and Wharton found that
firms who take a data driven approach to decisions get 5%-6%
better results and McKinsey estimates that big data can increase
profits in the retail sector by a whopping 60%.
In the research centre the computing power of big data
analytics enables us to find new cures and better understand
and predict disease patterns.
Big data analytics also allow us to monitor and predict
epidemics and disease outbreaks, simply by listening to what
people are saying, i.e. searching for on the Internet, i.e. “cures
for flu”.
We can use all the data from smart watches and wearable
devices to better understand links between lifestyles and
diseases.
Security services use big data analytics to foil terrorist plots
and detect cyber attacks.
Most elite sports have now embraced big data analytics. Many
use video analytics to track the performance of every player in
a football or baseball game, sensor technology is built into
sports equipment such as basket balls or golf clubs, and many
elite sports teams track athletes outside of the sporting
environment – using smart technology to track nutrition and
sleep, as well as social media conversations to monitor
emotional wellbeing.
Big data is used to improve many aspects of our cities and
countries. For example, it allows cities to optimize traffic flows
based on real time traffic information as well as social media and
weather data.
Where a bus would wait for a delayed train and where traffic signals
predict traffic volumes and operate to minimize jams.
A number of cities are currently using big data analytics with the
aim of turning themselves into Smart Cities, where the transport
infrastructure and utility processes are all joined up.
BUT in order to extract meaningful value from big data, you need
optimal processing power, analytics capabilities and skills. It is not
an easy task!
Big Data and Law!
What could be the
connection?
How big data can help to reduce various
problems in developing countries?
Remember that it is difficult to solve problems you canʼt
quantify, and the use of big data enables Least Developed
Countries to determine the extent of problems like food and
water, energy and electricity, sanitation, and primary
education before setting a roadmap to solve them.
What are needed to be done in order to
implement big data in developing countries?
 Big Data are a great opportunity for society. The opportunity
can be seized if three conditions are met.
Data factor: large amounts of data must be available for the
society in general, and not only for a small number of big
companies.
Human factor: the ability to analyze the data is widely spread.
Political factor: there is willingness to make decisions based
on the evidence deriving from data.
Do you see any connection in between big data
and Human Rights?
The Amnesty International creates a model of researching
Big Data’s effect on Human Rights. Rights group Amnesty
International USA could soon use data analytics to predict
which incidents are likely to escalate into larger human
rights violations. If successful, this endeavor may enable
those concerned about human rights to more effectively
address situations before they reach crisis points
 Risks
 Requiring tremendous programming effort and expertise to
develop data-intensive cloud applications.
 Data safety and data privacy get much harder to guarantee.
 The lack of clear vision and investment from governments
and private sector could lead data theft or data misuse or data
leak.
 How can you use this big data knowledge in your
future career?